Katherine Garrison Chapin
American poet and playwright (1890-1977)
Katherine Garrison Chapin (September 4, 1890 – December 30, 1977), sometimes known by her married name Katherine Biddle, was an American poet, librettist, and playwright. She is best known for two collaborations with composer William Grant Still: And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and Plain-Chant for America (1941).
Chapin began publishing poems in the late 1920s, in the popular press and in literary journals including Poetry. Many of her works, including her two joint compositions with Still, were musical libretti. Her corpus covers a variety of subjects, but evinces a particular fascination with politics and racial justice. Critics regarded her work as skilled, traditional, and somewhat lacking in feeling.
Life
Family
Katherine Garrison Chapin was born to a wealthy, well-connected family in Gilded Age New York. Her mother Cornelia Garrison Van Auken (1865–1925) was an actress. Her father Lindley Hoffman Chapin (1854–1896) was a Manhattan lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1874. Her parents were married on February 14, 1888, at 421 Fifth Avenue, Cornelia's family home.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1736241. VIAF identifies the subject as 45634544. The Library of Congress control number is n81147752. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1890, 1977, 1940 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katherine Garrison Chapin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.